Likelihood to Recommend IBM Power VM is well suited in a large environment where we have to run multiple virtual machines on a single hardware and utilize the hardware more efficiently. It directly saves the cost of the organization. Due to the high licensing cost of IBM Power VM, it's less appropriate for smaller, less critical applications that do not need a lot of performance.
Read full review I would recommend it to anyone who has three or more servers. We just received another quote as I am about to deploy Scale at City Hall as well. This will replace my 8-year-old VMware cluster that hosts 20 servers.
Read full review Pros Offers a very granular virtualization of each core. Provides a quick and easy environment to build and maintain. Is rock solid and provides a reliable production environment. Read full review Snapshots are lean and fast, so restore time is simply amazing. When you don't have time to wait after a crypto attack to restore, I have found nothing faster! Clients can never fully know their growth for years to come, and sometimes it is only a year after the original install. This is no problem we can build on to the system like Lego blocks. Just simply adding a node or two and there is no downtime! There are many functions that can be done while servers are running that help to maintain the most uptime, as an example disk size on the primary disk can be expanded without shutting down the server. Read full review Cons We have yet to upgrade VIOs from 2.2.0 to 2.2.3 which will provide the more GUI centric management, however, making the VIO servers easier to manage would be one area. I think this is done with the latest versions of HMC and PowerVM. More real-time and historical performance reporting. Read full review It exposes no backup API. You have to treat VMs as physical machines, with all the drawbacks. This is a huge problem, since the official partner Acronis can't deliver. If you ever worked with Veeam you want it back very very badly. Assigned RAM is used RAM. The hypervisor can't share memory or only allocate what is used etc. It's wasted RAM most of the time. No logging and auditing. (There is, but not visible to the customer). The GUI is quite bad. It looks like done by a designer instead of an IT expert. But it's improving constantly. The company relies heavily on KVM, but seems to have no developer in the open source community. This leads to answers like "we can't do anything about QEMU drivers". Yes, you can. Have delevopers working on it. You can't do basic things like list all of your VMs and see how much RAM/disk, etc. they are using (e.g. in a list view). No rules on which VMs start on which nodes, which VMs to prioritize, etc. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The product works. It provides the proven environment to support IBM's primary operating systems that run on the IBM Power processing systems. This by extension includes the IBM various storage products that work within that environment. It has proven to be seamless as the environment has grown and as various new products and version updates have been added. As with most IBM products, the support is excellent.
Read full review Since I have had no issues with downtime; easier management of my cluster and the ability to lower the number of devices in my Infrastructure, I will gladly renew my support contract with Scale Computing HC3 and upgrade my equipment with them when it comes time for it.
Read full review Usability Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never had an outage or an error. Once a hard drive failed, but Scale kept on working flawlessly without interruption.
Read full review Performance Performance has been just as outstanding as reliability. I have never experienced delays in any aspect of usage.
Read full review Support Rating The support team deserves major props for how cordial and professional they were with our implementation. We were assigned a project manager and engineer. Everything was scheduled with our kick-off call, and our engineer got us up and running in no time.
Read full review In-Person Training I did not do in-person training.
Read full review Online Training Because Scale is so simple, the training is just as quick and easy.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.
Read full review Alternatives Considered IBM PowerVM is the best and most stable product in the virtualization market. It gives the best performance with IBM Power Server, especially its best solution, where we have to run critical applications and save applications licensing costs. It provides a lot of good features like LPM, shared processor pool...etc, which makes the environment more flexible.
Read full review At the end of the day, and in the environment we are in, Scale just fits the bill, both price-wise and functionality-wise. Upgrading our VM environment was always a week-long process, now, it is a twenty-minute process, implementing, converting VMs, and rolling everything over to Scale was completed in less than a week's time, and that included training.
Read full review Scalability HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.
Read full review Return on Investment We are able to run several LPARs on one frame, which means we do not need to buy as many physical servers. That saves on floor space, power, and heating and cooling of the data center, among other things. Using LPM allows us to do maintenance on a frame without impacting the LPARs, giving us greater uptime. Read full review 0% downtime or loss of revenue due to downtime. The simplicity of testing backups in a live environment in the event of a technical catastrophe. Ease of mind and a lot less stress worrying about a raid system within a standalone server dying in the middle of the night. Read full review ScreenShots Scale Computing Platform Screenshots